j's scratchpad

Frederick Kilgour, the founder of OCLC, a developer of the shared catalog WorldCat, and a former Harvard librarian, died on July 31. Somehow I missed the news until I heard a bit on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday this morning. Here are links to a few obituaries:

• Library Journal

• The New York Times
• Weekend Edition Sunday (The audio of which will be available after 1 pm EST on Sunday.)
• OCLC

OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center, revolutionized how libraries did many tasks related to cataloging and shared catalogs. It’s difficult to imagine how different librarianship would be without it. Many libraries use it not only to catalog books, but to help connect library users with materials in other collections. Kilgour very well might have been one of the most important librarians of the Twentieth Century.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 10:03 am and is filed under Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.